URGENT - please save our friendship with Apollo science!

[chrisbobson]

Neil Armstrong said the temp was hotter than boiling water.  Wouldn't that melt or least mess up the flagpole?

That is exactly the discussion this thread has been about, and the answer is clearly NO.

Why not?  Seems pretty hot.  Answers so far strike me as inadequate.

Temperature on the moon is subject to one heat source...the Sun. The sun angles were ranging....over the missions...between 10 and 45 degrees, so the surface would not get to its maximum temperature. The letter Neil Armstrong wrote about this, is a kind of acknowledgement about the challenges to be faced on the Moon. To get around this, they landed early morning on every mission. Objects upright, such as rocks would get quite hot, but not the surface itself. The Lunar Module, the spacesuits, cameras, lunar rover etc. were all prepared with this in mind.

How is that an inadequate response to why an aluminium flag pole would not melt? The same heating issues exist on things orbiting the Earth and Moon, traveling to Venus, Mars and other planets. I have yet to see any CTer present any figures...... to back up any claim that lunar temperatures would be a problem. Are you going to? As for the flag itself, it is made of nylon.....melts rather than burns and at temperatures between 190–350 °C.

Not a problem for me, wondering if it was a problem for the flag.  Are we sure its made of nylon?

[gillianren]

As to nylon, does your spatula melt when you're cooking?  (Mine always eventually got nasty little strips of nylon at the end, so I've stopped using nylon spatulas.  But in fact I have nylon spoons that I put directly into pots of boiling water.)

[JayUtah]

The flags are consumer products made of nylon.  Conductive heat transfer into the flag is negligible.  Convective heat transfer to the flag is irrelevant.  Radiative heat transfer to the flag is subject to the optical properties of the flag alone.  Does nylon melt in Earth orbit?  No, it does not.  Therefore it will not melt on the Moon.

[Echnaton]

Not a problem for me, wondering if it was a problem for the flag.  Are we sure its made of nylon?

The flag was a standard nylon flag purchased from a Sears store in the Clear Lake area, which was then an unincorporated place within Harris County, TX.  Since 1977 it has been incorporated into the City of Houston.  The Sears store relocated to Baybrook mall about the same time.